


"Cold"

by AloryShannon



Category: Thor (2011)
Genre: Angst, Drabble, Gen, Oneshot, five minute fic, genfic for the win!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-01
Updated: 2012-01-01
Packaged: 2017-10-28 15:12:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/309214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AloryShannon/pseuds/AloryShannon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You honestly hadn’t known, hadn’t known what it meant, what it felt like.  But it comes to you in time, if not quite when or where you'd expected it to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	"Cold"

**Author's Note:**

> This rambling drabble is a response to [this moment](http://i1123.photobucket.com/albums/l550/alory_shannon4/Loki%20and%20Hiddles%20Stuffs%208D/Loki%20and%20Hiddles%20gifs/FeelingAnOddSenseOfBelonging.gif) in the movie.
> 
> Actually, I’ve been meaning to write something about that first Jotunheim scene for a while now, and...this isn’t quite it. Maybe that one will finally want be written someday.
> 
> (Also, the .gif was found on either Tumblr or Photobucket, can’t remember which, sorry. =\ I'll have to have another go at finding the source...but it's definitely not mine, and I am certainly not claiming it as such.)

You don’t remember exactly why you were on Midgard that night. You were just a child, it’s one of your first and oldest memories, and after all this time the details that you recall about those early days are oftentimes uncertain at best and downright hazy at worst. You do remember that your parents had brought you there, that your brother was standing in the (for you) hip-deep snow at your side with his hand firmly enclosed in your father’s, just as yours was held by your mother. Perhaps it was a festival, because you remember fire and the taste of a hot, bittersweet liquid and the smell of burning meat. Perhaps it was a funeral. The fire and the drink and the pungent scents would have differed little enough. You didn’t know then and you don’t know now either. But you do know that you were _very_ young and probably up _very_ far past your usual bedtime; so you had been content to stand there in the snow and concentrate solely on sleepily sipping at the drink in the oversized cup in your tiny hand.

Your mother, perhaps somewhat wary of your atypically docile behaviour (you were a troublemaker and a mischief-monger even then, she once told you with a smile and something very near to pride), had eventually expressed her concern as time had blurred and seconds and minutes and hours all melted together to form one amorphous mass.

 _Are you cold, Loki?_ she’d asked, gripping your hand a little tighter as she turned a smile down at you.

 _Cold?_ you’d had to say, tilting your head curiously to peer up at her through the lacy plumes of your own breath. _What’s that?_

You honestly hadn’t known, hadn’t known what it meant, what it felt like. And what’s more, it was a feeling, an experience, so there had been no way for it to be explained to you despite your curiosity. As the years passed and you grew from boy to man and traversed all the Nine Realms, that curiosity was never sated, until at last you’d given up on ever experiencing it for yourself. And that unanswered question didn’t bother you as much as you’d thought it might; rather, you’d simply accepted it, simply come to understand in a careless and detached sort of way that it wasn’t something you could ever know, if it truly existed at all. _Cold_ was merely a notion that had proved impossible to grasp, a concept as foreign to you as magic was to Thor or writing poetry would be to Hogun or going on a diet would be to Volstagg.

Or so you’d thought.

Because now you’ve been dragged to the one place your many adventures had never yet taken you. As your friends draw the collars of their cloaks a little tighter, as you watch your brother pretend like he isn’t shivering every bit as much as the rest of them, your skin crawls, and you begin to wonder. And as you turn troubled eyes over the desolate and yet somehow impossibly all-too-familiar landscape, you feel a heavy sort of dread and ghastly recognition and _something else_ stir inside you, a deep-rooted tremble that shudders its way through your entire being…and now, at long last, you think you finally understand the true meaning of that elusive, hateful word.


End file.
